3 Crucial Questions to Ask About Your Tech Recruitment Goals

Goal setting is critical to your developer hiring strategy. But as obvious as that statement might be, most talent acquisition leaders would probably agree that establishing goals is never easy.

Considering that over 90% of developers are employed at least part time, you need to ensure that your tech recruiters are productive and working on the right things. Still, you might be wondering how your tech recruiting tactics are making a marked impact on your company through your developer hiring. To help you keep your tech talent management strategy on track, here are a few crucial questions to ask yourself about every tech recruitment goal that you’ve set.

Imagine that you’ve scheduled 20% more interviews with Back-End Developers than you did last quarter. That’s a big win, right? It would be if your company wants to optimize its back-end operations this year—but not if your C-Level leaders are hoping to modernize the front-end experience on a mobile app.

The key to setting the right talent acquisition goals is to determine how relevant they are to your entire organization, not just to your tech recruitment function. If you’re not recruiting, interviewing, and hiring the tech talent that your company needs, you’re ultimately not helping the business move forward.

With the second quarter of the business year upon us, spend some time evaluate what your team accomplished between January and March. As you do that, review the overall business initiatives that your management team set at the beginning of the year. How closely do your team’s activities align with those business goals? While we’re not suggesting that you let other managers dictate how your team operates, it’s up to you to ensure that your work is contributing to everyone else’s success.

Are You Looking at the Right Metrics?

Let’s go a little deeper with the example that we just discussed. Perhaps you have done a lot of work to recruit the Front-End developers that your company needs. This answers our previous question, but how are you measuring success—and are you measuring the right things?

For example, your engineering team might need immediate help in shipping a new front-end experience by the end of the summer. In that case, an increase in the number of developers in your pipeline won’t be quite as significant as the number of qualified and interested applicants you’ve received for the role. On the other hand, if you’re preparing for an opening that you know is about to open, the growth of your developer pipeline would be a much more relevant metric to track.

Is it Time to Adjust or Create Brand New Goals?

The most influential talent acquisition leaders know how to set concrete targets for their teams. They also know when it’s time to let go of talent acquisition goals and create brand new ones.

Sure, it’s never easy to adjust a goal on the fly, especially when you’ve seen steady progress. At the same time, priorities can change at the drop of a hat. One day, your CTO might be eager to hire as many Front-End Developers as you can find. But the next day, your company’s management team could determine that Data Scientists are a more critical technical need.

With that in mind, be flexible about how you allocate your team’s resources. If one tech recruitment goal suddenly becomes more important than the one you’ve prioritized recently, don’t be afraid to shift gears mid-quarter.

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Rich is a Content Marketing Writer at Stack Overflow, where he covers the latest in tech recruiting and developer engagement. When he's not writing, Rich can be found hanging with his wife, watching his favorite college football team with his dad, or running around Manhattan in preparation for his next marathon.